Beauty, Mercy, Justice

Bad Timing…

Here it is, fifteen minutes before I need to leave for work, and I learn that Pope Francis has issued a new Apostolic Exhortation. I only have time to skim it, but it looks like it is explosive. Those who tried to dismiss this pope’s inherent radicalism by saying that he was speaking off the cuff? Well, they have some ‘splaining to do. A brief excerpt (and I am sure you will be hearing more from me when I have time to read it carefully);

189. Solidarity is a spontaneous reaction by those who recognize that the social function of property and the universal destination of goods are realities which come before private property. The private ownership of goods is justified by the need to protect and increase them, so that they can better serve the common good; for this reason, solidarity must be lived as the decision to restore to the poor what belongs to them. These convictions and habits of solidarity, when they are put into practice, open the way to other structural transformations and make them possible. Changing structures without generating new convictions and attitudes will only ensure that those same structures will become, sooner or later, corrupt, oppressive and ineffectual.

202.The need to resolve the structural causes of poverty cannot be delayed, not only for the pragmatic reason of its urgency for the good order of society, but because society needs to be cured of a sickness which is weakening and frustrating it, and which can only lead to new crises. Welfare projects, which meet certain urgent needs, should be considered merely temporary responses. As long as the problems of the poor are not radically resolved by rejecting the absolute autonomy of markets and financial speculation and by attacking the structural causes of inequality,[173]no solution will be found for the world’s problems or, for that matter, to any problems. Inequality is the root of social ills.

203. The dignity of each human person and the pursuit of the common good are concerns which ought to shape all economic policies. At times, however, they seem to be a mere addendum imported from without in order to fill out a political discourse lacking in perspectives or plans for true and integral development. How many words prove irksome to this system! It is irksome when the question of ethics is raised, when global solidarity is invoked, when the distribution of goods is mentioned, when reference in made to protecting labour and defending the dignity of the powerless, when allusion is made to a God who demands a commitment to justice. At other times these issues are exploited by a rhetoric which cheapens them. Casual indifference in the face of such questions empties our lives and our words of all meaning. Business is a vocation, and a noble vocation, provided that those engaged in it see themselves challenged by a greater meaning in life; this will enable them truly to serve the common good by striving to increase the goods of this world and to make them more accessible to all.

204. We can no longer trust in the unseen forces and the invisible hand of the market. Growth in justice requires more than economic growth, while presupposing such growth: it requires decisions, programmes, mechanisms and processes specifically geared to a better distribution of income, the creation of sources of employment and an integral promotion of the poor which goes beyond a simple welfare mentality. I am far from proposing an irresponsible populism, but the economy can no longer turn to remedies that are a new poison, such as attempting to increase profits by reducing the work force and thereby adding to the ranks of the excluded.

I addressed a bit of this on my blog, but there are a lot of paragraphs on economics, wealth, the poor, etc. in which to mine. One thing that struck me immediately was how much clearer and hard-hitting these passages were than those found in Benedict XVI’s encyclicals — and keep in mind that the neo-Caths had a very difficult time coming to terms with them.

I am not sure if Acton and others will try to spin the Pope’s words so much as ignore them. After spin-doctoring a lot of John Paul II’s social teaching, they basically learned to just ignore what Benedict wrote or claim, quite implausibly, that they weren’t “really” Benedict’s words. Here, however, you have a Pope who has already gone on record (albeit off-the-cuff record) on many of these issues who is now restating them in a very concentrated and powerful manner. There’s no getting around them, and so I think they will simply have to ignore them or, absent that, exercise the “Tom Woods Option” and claim — again implausibly — that since the Pope is not competent to speak on economics (economics being a “science” after all), no Catholic has to actually pay attention to what he says on those matters.

If you’d actually read Tom Woods, instead of reading what you heard someone said he said, that’s not what he says AT ALL. He says that the Pope is competent to speak faith and morals, including as it relates to economics, but his point is that policies recommendations are not binding on the faithful. Try reading his book. The methodology of Austrian economics really is the only one consistent with Catholicism as it emphasizes the unique individual rather than the faceless number as mainstream economics do.

My only gripe with Tom Woods is that he has a tendency for knee-jerk corporate apologetics when a freed market would dismantle the neoliberal corporation and leave much more room for worker-ownership and unrestricted unionization.

I am familiar with the works of Mr. Woods and the Austrians. My “Woods Option” remarks are, admittedly, generalized, but I don’t think your exoneration really works since Woods, like his Austrian cohorts, holds to the deeply misguided view that economics is a free-standing science without intrinsic moral qualities. Woods (and many Austrians) like to play the card that their theory is positive, not normative, but if that is true, then on what basis could any Austrian actually reject the undeniably normative claims of the Pope when it comes to economic policies? Unlike neoclassical economics of the Chicago School, Austrians do not have recourse to Pareto/Kaldor-Hicks efficiency as a normative yardstick to measure policy prescriptions; the Austrians, by definition, stay out of that realm, which perhaps explains why they have had very little effect on areas such as the Law & Economics movement. (It also explains why Austrians constantly have to import Enlightenment/Lockean conceptions of natural law and rights in order to give their positions some degree of normative heft.)

The United States isn’t even mentioned until section 64, and when it is, it is mentioned in a remarkably balanced way that attacks equally those who worship Individualistic Liberty on both the left and the right.

Since I can’t reply to the other comment, you say: “The Austrians aren’t compatible with Sections 56-59, and especially not Section 64. Not at all.”

Because you think “Austrian” is a synonym for neoliberal capitalist and don’t know anything about the school except the nonsense dreamed up by the Distributist Review polemicists who think it means “someone who thinks ethics has nothing to do with economics.” It’s a style of economic analysis that emphasizes the acting individual and on a more theoretical level is critical of economic interventionism because the vast array of unintended consequences and socially destructive effects of it. And if you do some readings you’ll find that economists in the Austrian school have been equally critical of big business precisely because the collusion between state and business that creates the form of social domination commonly referred to as capitalism, though they do not use the word capitalism in that sense of the word but rather in the sense of a free market which historically were considered antonymous until the twentieth century, but I’m getting off topic.

The control that finance capitalists refuse from governments is not magical regulation that will keep them in check but the repeal of legal privileges that maintain the capitalist order. Pope Francis mentions tackling the structural causes of inequality. That’s great. The study of economics can inform us of what these might be, such as the fact that capitalism and the modern nation-state are by their very structure contributing to their problem and must be transformed into something else. The classical economists and the early socialists pointed out the social destruction caused by state granted (there is no other kind) monopolies, especially land monopoly, which continues to this day in Latin America and Asia. The Austrians in turn warn of the dangers of centrally planned economies, central banking, economic interventionism and make incredibly serious criticisms of the structure of the state as we know it today. But by far, their most important contribution to contemporary economic thought is the emphasis on the acting individual rather than the numbers that dominate mainstream economic thought.

Of course the Church is opposed to unrestricted “capitalism”, because capitalism as understood historically is the social domination by the capitalist class, which has been somewhat alleviated by legal palliatives that produce problems of their own. The long-term solution is the restructuring of the entire economic order from a capitalist system to system of distributism. Since capitalism is upheld by the primary interventions of land monopoly, tariff monopoly, banking monopoly, and patent monopoly, it is these primary interventions that must be done away with to restore a just economic order.

The state too, must be restructured, because the modern nation-state birthed at Westphalia, the territorial monopoly of violence, can hardly be considered a thing of Christian morality. Federalism from the ground up can be a means towards a just state that replaces the existing states, which rely on arbitrary factors of territoriality and violence to maintain power, rather than the consent and control of the governed. Federalism ultimately means the self-government of communities, real communities, cities, villages, etc. bound up in loose associations, rather than the top-down imposition of a distant entity onto every little municipality. It’s no more utopian than the belief that a few fishermen could make disciples of all nations.

And section 64 has literally nothing in it that could possibly be connected to the belief that credit expansion at low interest rates causes business cycles, or that centrally planned economies suffer from calculation problems due to the lack of price signals. Absolutely nothing. It’s a method of analysis, not a philosophy. You’re just making things up at this point.

“Because you think “Austrian” is a synonym for neoliberal capitalist and don’t know anything about the school except the nonsense dreamed up by the Distributist Review polemicists who think it means “someone who thinks ethics has nothing to do with economics.”

You haven’t the slightest clue who you are talking to Captain Brilliant.

I’ve read the Austrians. My one big complaint is that they are moral relativists, and that is entirely incompatible with the criticism of relativism in section 64. I see no way to prevent fraud if you’ve already prevented force.

The only difference between an Austrian and a Crony Capitalist is having enough money to bribe a politician, because under the free market, bribery should be allowed.

It is the distributist position that price signals are insufficient- you need emotional cues as well, and that requires *direct friendship* between producer and consumer.

I’m not done yet- there are abortion quotes? I bet they don’t make sense without the economic context though. After all, who is more the outsider than a member of the generation not allowed to live to support the material wealth of the parents and grandparents?

I’m not saying they don’t make sense. I think they do. It’s just that the National Catholic Register crowd will single in on the quotes about abortion and ignore the quotes on the free market, for my money.

Economic justice is inseparable from reproductive justice and sexual justice. This is Intersectionality 101. So long as the Catholic Church remains committed to homophobia, cissupremacy, anti-choice extremism and patriarchy these are nothing but empty words.

Just one example-nothing ruins a woman’s economic status like an unwanted pregnancy.

Someone needs to learn what those words mean….but the very fact you could make light of these systems of oppression speak to the blindness you have to your own privilege. No doubt you are white, male, heterosexual, and cisgendered.

If you are asking honestly, then cisgendered is the opposite of transgendered, someone who is cisgendered has a gender identity that agrees with their societally recognized sex.

If you are, instead, engaging in an intellectually lazy critique of a typo I made on my iPad, I have to wonder why you let your privilege lead you to make this petty point rather than examining your own Cis privilege.

And of course, according to Ken and his heterophobic ilk, NOBODY should be allowed to be cisgendered because that’s against the Rainbow Revolution in which women need to be allowed to kill children in exchange for material wealth.

And “intersectionality,” this week’s fad-word of the radical left, is the bottom line, eh? The unchanging constant on which you will build all theory and practice. Until it changes again, and the people still clinging to it are denounced as oppressors and dupes with false consciousness. By the way, comrade, I notice you use the word “patriarchy.” A truly informed revolutionary knows that “patriarchy” is itself reinforcing of the cishet hegemony and the word “kyriarchy” is now greatly preferred. I suspect you may have been unduly influenced by outmoded Second Wave radical feminists, who have been renounced and condemned by the party. The Chairpersyn will see you in zir office immediately.

Empty words? Economic justice feeds hungry people and gives dignity to workers and peasants. However, “homophobia, cissupremacy, anti-choice extremism and patriarchy these are nothing but empty words.”

Homphobia is a “first-world” problem? Try telling that to GLBT persons in Africa (especially in Uganda) who are being oppressed and even murdered with a big assist from Evangelicals and the Catholic Church.

Ken’s out of nowhere rabid denunciations and his equating of economic justice with gender and sexual identity issues is of course ridiculous, but it’s fair to say the Church has done a poor job of repenting of its own bias and violence around these issues and responding pastorally to gender and sexuality minorities. And by “the Church” I mean almost all of us. There is a very interesting writer named Melinda Selmys who is an orthodox (as far as I can tell) Catholic, very well read, who is uniquely positioned to address these issue intelligently and compassionately. She just started a series on transgender and Catholicism that is already challenging my fairly conventional response to the whole question. Anyone who wants to respond to this kind of thing with more than just an eye-roll, this might be a good place to start. http://sexualauthenticity.blogspot.com/2013/11/trans-formations.html
(By the way, if anyone really wants to know, cis-gendered means your self identity matches your genitals. It’s an attempt to denormatize non-transexuality.)

I’ll admit I could never wrap my head around the denunciations of those who have surgery to correct their gender. While it is hardly the ideal, I’m telling you right now that if I wake up tomorrow with a penis, that puppy is going straight to the chopping block (not that I have anything against penises–I just don’t have any desire to deal with having one of my own) There’s no way I could live in the wrong body. Why Catholics assume it’s something in the head that is wrong has never made sense to me—humans are born with all sorts of body “defects,” why is it so hard to believe that one of those might involve being born with the wrong set of hormones and genitals?

There is no easy answer to this issue, and I have nothing but the greatest empathy with those who feel they are living in the wrong-gendered body. I’d lose my mind trying to do it.

Sorry, I thought that “normal” just meant what 90% or more of the population was like. And believe me, I have never been too “normal”, nor aside from my childhood and youth in the “near golden age” of the working class, or my single working class days, been remotely “privileged”…with marriage and 8 kids I am nowhere near that status. How ’bout you Ken? You poor? Or another bourgeois leftist?

As long as people continue to feel this way, the cycle will continue. What do you even mean about white skin making you so priveleged even if you are a dirt poor white man or woman? My very non-white friends and colleagues would be offended at such exaltation of the white man’s skin.

Frankly I love non-white skin; I would have preferred to marry a non-white man just because I would have liked to have non-white babies, but alas, it wasn’t meant to me, and my husband is as lily-white as I am. That’s okay, too, because in the end, skin color has very little importance to me.

I don’t understand those who continue to insist on the inherent value (not monetary, as you pointed out yourself) of white skin—you perpetuate the problem.

Now, if you want to make an argument that being white or being male statistically gives you more earning power, I’ll buy—not sure what the current statistics are, and I’d be interested to see them, but I have little doubt there continues to be injustice in this arena. This is exactly the type of injustice we should continue to work against.

But as far as white skin being inherently better? No way am I buying into that prejudice, and I will vehemently argue against those who continue to perpetuate this kind of wrong-headed thinking.

If you are gay and black or Hispanic and affluent and American you are privileged beyond all measure.
Look, no one is dismissing the pain that any of these things brings. I just do not see how this is relevant to the discussion about the pope’s groundbreaking letter….

I find it endlessly intriguing how the identity- and sex/gender-obsessed wing of the radical left have practically disqualified economic concerns from their “oppression olympics” entirely, while retaining the classic Marxist vocabulary and framing. They will say with a straight and sober face that a hotel maid making $7.25 has “cis privilege” over some hideously wealthy male crossdresser who takes offense at her confusion over his gender presentation, and that she has done actual damage to him somehow, damage on par with the actual violence experienced by third world transsexual prostitutes. Awfully handy, seeing as how all these sexual and gender identities can be put on and taken off at will thanks to postmodernism, too.

If you are, instead, engaging in an intellectually lazy critique of a typo I made on my iPad, I have to wonder why you let your privilege lead you to make this petty point rather than examining your own Cis privilege.

Accussing others of being privileged while showing off your own wealth (oppresed iPad owners of the world join!)…

Claiming that white privilege and all the rest is more important than economic status is ludicrous, but those privileges are real and you have them and use them even if you are not wealthy. It’s basically the flip side of racism, or sexism or whatever. Here is the most commonly cited explanation of white privilege, which I think is a good one and not to long. http://www.amptoons.com/blog/files/mcintosh.html And if you don’t want to take it so serious, here’s Louis CK’s great riff on it (language warning) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qg48ZZ2wYfM

But isn’t all of this mostly due to “majority privilege”? What happens when enough of us here in the US are no longer white-skinned (it’s coming–between immigration, intermarrying, etc)? Some group will stlil be exercising privilege, that mush is a guarantee, given human nature. There will always be oppression. Blaming it on skin color becomes increasingly ridiculous as we become more homogeneous with globalization and immigration.

I looked at that long list of signs of white privilege, and many of them simply don’t make that much sense anymore, only 25 years after the article was written. I know there are areas of the country where racial and skin-color prejudice are still very much alive and well—and believe stronly we must continue to work against it–but increasingly, these areas of the country are seen as backward and joke-worthy by the rest of the country.

I know that somebody can look at this and say I only perceive this because I am white, but I am a woman, too, so I know a bit about being on the receiving end of oppression. At the same time, I believe we have come a LONG way in the past few decades when it comes to women’s issues. I earn as much as the males I work with, I don’t have to worry about getting fired for getting pregnant, I don’t have to endure lewd comments and other forms of sexual harrassment in the workplace. Do I still think there is room for improvement? Of course, but to not acknowledge the positive changes that have occurred and are occurring is also ludicrous. Considering the treatement of women even 100 years ago, we have come a long way, baby.

You can’t change society in a day. Humans will bully and oppress, no matter what their skin color or gender, and this will always be so. What changes is who is dominant. It’s hard not to believe that before too long, white skin will no longer be dominant here in the US. That bothers me not in the least, but I do wonder who will have the “privilege” at that point. Because some group always will.

I mostly agree, although there are a lot of countries like Mexico and India where light skinned people are advantaged even though they are a small minority and I don’t expect America to change so swiftly when we dip below 50% either.

I think the Trayvon Martin case brought a lot of lingering white privilege to the surface. First, as a white person one can wear a hoodie and walk around a gated community at night and not think some wacko is going to provoke a lethal encounter with you. But in the ensuing discussions people brought up a lot of the little insidious ways black people are alienated and white people are privileged. Just having people make eye contact and not shy away on the elevator in a fancy building, being able to talk in the accent of your upbringing without being thought ignorant, not having people ask your opinion ‘as a black person’ about some random issue involving race as if you must be an expert and because you are the only black person they know. As a woman, I’m sure you know, it’s being able to walk down a street at night without feeling at risk of assault or lewd comment from every strange man. You’re right society has made huge progress, maybe as much institutional progress as can be made, and these things pale in comparison to economic or political oppression. But they are still injustices and where we need to work on them is in our personal lives and discourse. That’s why talking about privilege can be an important thing and if Ken had brought it up in a more thoughtful way he could have actually contributed something.

“But they are still injustices and where we need to work on them is in our personal lives and discourse.”

I think we are largely in agreement. There will always be injustice to work against, both institutionally and personally. I don’t believe there will ever be a day that a woman can walk down the street at night without any concerns of sexual assault whatsoever, no matter where she is. The biology is simply against us in the sense that men will always be physically stronger, and there will always be the tendency for the strong to victimize those weaker than they are. I would like to think there is more hope for true equalization when it comes to skin color, but who knows; for the life of me, I can’t figure out why darker skin color should make a person inferior or more victimizable in any way–whether in the US, Mexico, or India, but there it is.

” First, as a white person one can wear a hoodie and walk around a gated community at night and not think some wacko is going to provoke a lethal encounter with you.”

That is completely incorrect. A hoodie in a gated community will be just as offensive on a white as on a black- I’ve been shot at for it back in the mid 1990s. Whites can be drug addicts, thieves, and pushers also.